Review - It Came From Beyond The Still

Another week, another review for an ArmChairGeneral game, but this time something quite different, a departure from the steampunk of When the Navy Walked. It's the newer aliens versus hillbillies skirmisher It Came From Beyond The Still, a game doing well for itself at Wargames Vault, likely for reasons both obvious and less obvious. The theme alone is likely a selling point, but the game rewards the reading and playing too.

The pdf is 23 pages in black and white, with the high quality artwork now standard for ArmChairGeneral. The edging shows representatives of the factions, probably all six, a mix of the near-threatening in the case of the humans and comic in that of the aliens. The individual pieces scattered through the text are even flashier, in a cartoon-like 3D style, bordered as if family snaps. That said, page load time was a little sluggish for me, and if it was the image size doing it, quality might be double-edged.

The game aims at humour all the way through, and there's a fun blending of familiar tropes. It's none too politically correct though, and I can imagine offence being taken on one or two points. The setting is modern-day trailer parks and a rural US, with the alien factions the grays, blobs and cephalopods, with their robot, tripod and UFO, and the human factions the moonshine-making Hatfields and McCoys, and the Authorities.

It begins with introductory messages from representatives two of the factions, then a light-hearted presentation of the core game concepts. Some of the key elements have unusual, even fun names, which could well make them easier for those new to wargames to understand, and the basic mechanisms are generally comfortably simple for picking up and playing, not much more than ranges, 'Hit Me' rolls and wounds, plus a range of 'Cool Powers' and critical hits for the machines. Cover is assumed for example, although the visibility and courage rules may be slightly less clear to the uninitiated.

I also found the wording of some of the rules a little vague, meaning it could be best to have at least one of the players be a more experienced gamer, something which anyway seems likely given the audience here and for Wargames Vault. This vagueness is actually one of the benefits of the system in my opinion, but I'll get to that in a moment.

The mechanisms as we understood them produced some very dynamic play, with a lot of sneaking, shock inter-species meetings and blazing away. The effect was not only comic, but suggestive of reality - get too close to the wrong end of shotgun for example and it's still curtains. There's plenty of scope for tactics too, with cat and mouse chases among trailers and flank attacks through the deep corn.

Each of the factions gets around one-and-a-half to two-and-a-half pages of tongue-in-cheek description and profiles with a selection of named individuals, in some cases machines or vehicles, and in one case also the family dog. It was the details and images in this section that did a lot to win me over to the setting before we started playing, with the text covering subjects like the true nature of pink flamingos and finding station wagon keys, and the art showing vignettes of faction interactions, as well as giving plenty of inspiration for modelling and suggestions of what gameplay might cover.

There are some minor issues with clarity in this section too, in the specifics of telepathy say, and arguably with consistency in the presentation of rolls on the profiles, as well as a handful of minor editing issues. That said, with any issues discussed before play none of them need cause any trouble, and the game is clearly intended to be played in a mood relaxed enough for the players to improvise and even add things in, maybe on the hoof, not to mention the fact the intro does encourage the players to mod the ruleset. This is all conducive to things spinning out of control and I can see other players really getting into the swing of things too, building on the B movie atmosphere.

There are four scenarios, all of which seem aimed at producing an organised chaos. Each has three to four factions present and increasing numbers of factors to consider, but leaving out or combining factions seems natural given their broad grouping into humans or aliens, making one-on-one play possible too. The maps are the usual goodness from Scrying Eye Games, a style seen already with When the Navy Walked, in the Quick Play, the Revised Core and the Conflict on Mars! supplement.

The first scenario involves a lost juvenile blob, the second a misprobed mutant chicken; in the third the grays collect samples from wandering livestock and the other factions, while the authorities look for a moonshine still and try to make arrests, with the clans themselves fighting over one member; the fourth is an all-out invasion of a trailer park. The low number of individuals present in the first couple of scenarios especially make these fast-moving and refreshingly open-ended. The vagueness here was more limited, tied into deployment locations and the specific nature of the livestock being probed.

To turn to the vagueness then, we found it an advantage in two ways, and I've begun to wonder whether it might actually be intentional. It's a benefit first for prompting ownership of the gameplay, using the details given only as a starting point for actual setup and action, and second for potentially keeping the players discussing right the way through and not taking the thing too seriously. As mentioned, the rules and scenarios can be seen as a suggestion of what could be done, a basis to build from, encouragement to dive in with whatever weird miniature or terrain combos you have or can come up with.

In summary, it's comic if potentially offensive, and it builds well on popular perceptions of the mythos of alien invasion and abduction, the trailer park and the modern rural landscape, and B movies in general. It's a game that should be fairly easy to introduce to non-wargamers and easily adapted to suit the preferences of a group, a good starting point for development in various narrative directions. The experience at the table was of a fluid back and forth which tested plans and forced improvisation, and had us imagining ourselves into the setting. I started out in a kind of mild shock at what seemed a shallow concept and system, and ended up having a great time and recognising the real value the game could have even beyond the tabletop if the creative urge is followed.

If you're interested in a look inside yourself, there's a preview option on the dedicated page at Wargames Vault, where it's currently one of their top ten hottest items. The pdf is also available direct from ArmChairGeneral here at the When the Navy Walked site.

As the dust settles, the strange lights fade and the swaying of the corn slows, it looks like another win for ArmChairGeneral, and more evidence the guys involved are an up-and-coming studio. As I've suggested re WtNW, there's a strong upward trajectory.

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